The first unit study we've been doing is about trains. My boys love trains. We have some train stuff here, but if they go to my parents house, Sam will do pretty much nothing except play with their Brio train stuff for hours. It seemed like a good place to start.

As I said before, one of my goals was to keep spending to a minimum. Since we're not spending a ton of time on schoolwork each day, I didn't feel like I needed to get an organized curriculum. Initially, I just wanted to read some books and do a few activities. I've since expanded that to include YouTube videos and shows and music. I'll go through what we do and then list all the materials we've used or plan to use.

In the morning, we read the books through at least once. Sometimes the boys will request them later in the day and we'll read them again. I leave some out for them to look at on their own. Sometime in mid-morning or early afternoon we work on an activity-- right now, we've just been doing coloring but I'd like to build up to some activities with scissors, glue, paint, and play dough. Today, we listened to two of the songs over lunch. We've watched a few YouTube clips here and there throughout the week and they've watched the "Train" episode of their favorite show twice this week.

And we talk. We talk while we're reading, while we're coloring, while they're playing. I ask them to try new words, to identify or repeat numbers or letters that we see, colors that we use, or talk about things we're listening to. I have in my notes that I wanted to focus on recognizing numbers 1-3 and the first letters of their own names, but we ended up doing all the way through eight or so because there happened to be some numbers on the train pictures they colored. At least once every coloring session, I help them hold a crayon and write their own names once and then the first letters several times, so they've started requesting "T" and "S" when I help them draw other things.

If you have questions about how school is going for us, ask in the comments or email me! I might write occasional updates about that, but for now and probably even more in future posts, I'm just going to focus on what materials we've used because every kid is going to interact with stuff on different level dependent on age, personality, and previous exposure to concepts.

So, materials!

Books
The Little Engine That Could by Watty Piper
My Little Train by Satomi Ichikawa
John Henry by Ezra Jack Keats
Freight Train by Donald Crews
The Busy Little Train by Anna Claybourne and Jo Moon
That’s Not My Train by Usborne Books

Songs
John Henry, Harry Belafonte
It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry, Bob Dylan

Clips/Videos
Swiss Steam Trains
"Train" Yo Gabba Gabba! episode
Alphabet Train

Projects
Three Train Coloring Pages-- Starry Engine, Train Car, and Caboose
We still haven't read the John Henry book because I need to pick it up from the library. The coloring pages we did one page a day until we'd done all of them, and then we put them all together: